Depeche Mode: M (2025)
Depeche Mode: M arrives as something of a milestone document. The 2023 Memento Mori Tour, which forms the backbone of this film, was the band's first major run of dates following the death of founding member and keyboardist Andrew Fletcher in May 2022, and the shadow of that loss hangs over the whole project. Dave Gahan and Martin Gore pressed on, and Mexico City, where the band have long enjoyed a following that borders on the devotional, provided two nights of shows that the filmmakers clearly felt were worth preserving as more than mere archive footage. There is a reason the film is titled M: the letter does a lot of quiet work, pointing at once to mortality, Mexico, and the Memento Mori record itself.
The film is directed by Luis Fernando Frías de la Parra, the Mexican filmmaker best known for his 2021 feature Te Llevaré Conmigo, and produced through a collaboration between Sony Music Vision, Columbia Records, Anonymous Content, and Redrum. It is a co-production between the United States and Mexico, and that dual identity is more than a credit-roll formality. The film does not simply plant cameras in front of the stage and roll tape. Instead it weaves the concert footage together with interstitial material that engages with Mexican cultural attitudes toward death, a thematic frame that connects the music to the particular place and the particular moment in the band's history. The writing credits are not available, but the structural ambition behind that framing is evident on screen. Running at 95 minutes, it sits comfortably between the concert film and the documentary essay, without fully committing to either.
Gahan and Gore are, naturally, the two figures the film orbits. Gahan has always been a stage presence of considerable physicality, and Gore remains the band's principal songwriter and emotional centre. Daniel Giménez Cacho, the Mexican actor perhaps best known internationally from Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria (2021), appears in the interstitial sections, lending the non-concert material a considered, literary quality. His presence is an interesting creative choice, connecting the project to a tradition of art cinema that thinks carefully about memory, place, and loss.
On the craft side, the cinematography is handled by Damián García, whose work here has the kind of texture you would expect from a filmmaker rooted in Mexican cinema rather than the polished but unremarkable visual grammar of many corporate concert films. The concert sequences are wide and luminous, catching the scale of the arena while occasionally pulling in tight enough to register the intimacy of particular moments between Gahan and the crowd. The editing is a joint effort from Yibrán Asuad and Melisa San Vincente, and the intercutting between performance and the quieter documentary passages gives the film a rhythm that is less about the setlist and more about the accumulation of feeling. The score for the interstitial sections is uncredited, but the sound design throughout serves the music well, and the mix of the live performances is clean and present without tipping into the kind of processed sheen that can make arena concerts feel antiseptic on screen. For a companion piece on the particular way Mexican cinema handles questions of identity and place, see also Y Tu Mamá También (2001), and I also covered the documentary space in my review of The Last Days (1998), a very different kind of music film but one that raises similar questions about what a concert document is actually for.
Your mileage with Depeche Mode: M will depend almost entirely on one thing, and it is not the film-making itself. It is how you feel about Depeche Mode.
If you love the band, I suspect you will love this, a chance to sit inside two of their 2023 Mexico City shows with the sound turned up. If they do nothing for you, it is unlikely to win you over. I fall squarely into the second camp, and I have tried to judge it on those terms.
To its credit, it is rather more than a straight concert film. It threads the performance footage through with interstitial material on music, mortality and the Mexican relationship with death, and those narrative additions are a nice touch, giving the whole thing a shape and a reach beyond the setlist. As a piece of craft it is well made, the concert footage handsomely shot and the quieter sections thoughtful, and I can see the care that has gone into it.
The trouble, for me, is simply that I am indifferent to the music at the heart of it, and no amount of craft can quite bridge that gap. I had much the same experience with Miss Americana, another music documentary built around an artist I do not especially follow: I could appreciate it from the outside without ever being drawn in.
As a performance and as a documentary, Depeche Mode: M is perfectly fine. For me it is simply average. Three stars, and if you are a fan, add half a star or more and pay me no mind.
Depeche Mode: M is a film that knows its audience and, to a fair degree, delivers for them. It is a more considered piece of work than the average tour document, and Frías de la Parra brings enough formal curiosity to keep it from being simple fan service. Whether the thematic ambition quite earns its place alongside the concert footage, or whether the two halves ever fully speak to each other, is the question at the film's heart. At 95 minutes and with genuine craft behind the camera, it has real things to offer. But a music film lives or dies by what happens when the music comes on, and that, in the end, is not something any director can manufacture.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-10-03
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Depeche Mode: M (2025) on YouTube
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